I'm trying to use the Animation Editor to generate simple cubic bezier curves for an external application, however; the target app needs both the points and handles expressed in the same X,Y coordinates, similar to the below image.

Can someone help explain how the animation curves work in TD? I'm wrapping my head as to how to interpret "standard" (from my point of view, as an animator coming from after effects, c4d & web animation) cubic-bezier data into the TD keyframes. As the OP stated, it seems like the values are normalized and after digging through the doc's I still can't find any clarification on "inslope, inaccell..." etc.

In the case of bezier() animation curves it uses some trig to convert inslope, inacceleration, invalue, outslope, outacceleration, outvalue into 4 vertices, to build a 2D bezier.From this 2D bezier, it then extracts a unique value for each point in time (roughly a 1D function).

To avoid this conversion into a 1D function, you may consider using proper 3D Bezier curves (or 2D by keeping the Z component at zero), in geometry.

Thank you for the detailed response. Using the references to the Bezier Class and ScriptSOP, I put together a simple script that does indeed give me the appropriate bezier-curve I'm looking for (in reference to: http://cubic-bezier.com/#.99,.03,.47,.95). I added parameters for controlling the X/Y of each tangent pair, omitting Z like you mentioned.

Two additional questions:1— How do I use this curve in my animation? Previously I'd create an Animation Comp and set a 2D keyframe curve manually, then I'd hook that up to a Lookup CHOP driven by a custom slider or TimerCHOP to create a proper normalized output (that I'd remap via Math CHOP's to my needs). Is there a way to send this curve to the Keyframe component or hook it up directly into the Lookup CHOP?

2— Back to my original question: Is there any default way I can create this cubic-bezier curve using just the Keyframe editor? If not, I'm planning on turning this into a tox component I can share.. once I figure out how to use it, of course